Ilya Yashin begins the letter by describing that he is in solitary confinement that he shares with three other prisoners, all convicted of drug offenses. He has his own bed unlike other prisoners in the prison, who are crammed up to 30 people into each cell and have to sleep in shifts.
"But those of us in solitary confinement are more strictly controlled and we are searched much more often," Yashin wrote in the letter.
Told about what happened in Butja – was considered to lie
It was at the beginning of April last year that Ilya Yashin published a video on his Youtube channel with almost 1.5 million followers. In the video, he commented on images of torture and death that the outside world saw after Butya was liberated from the Russian forces.
In the video, Yashin spoke about both the war crimes Russia is suspected of committing in Butya and the Russian Defense Ministry's comments denying the allegations. Yashin questioned the Russian official version, but despite accounting for both sides, he was convicted under a law prohibiting the dissemination of false information about the Russian army.
The law was passed just days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. Ilya Yashin is the one who has received the longest sentence so far.
"The days here look the same"
Yashin continued to talk about Russia's atrocities in Ukraine until he was arrested in July. Today he is in one of Russia's largest prisons with more than 2,000 prisoners.
"The days here look the same. I spend most of my time reading books and writing letters and various texts. Once a day I go out for a one-hour walk, but the outdoor environment most resembles my cell. It's the same concrete walls, a roof over your head and barbed wire," he writes.
Hear what Ilya Yashin writes to SVT Nyheter in the clip above.